Pizza is an American Invention, and it Involves Pineapple

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and each week I'm joined by two incredible co-hosts. This week, I am joined by the early bird, Matt Birchler. He was four minutes early, everybody. Hello, hello. Thank you. Thank you for once again airing our dirty laundry in front of the world. Matt's usually late, but that's because he's big business boy, Birchler. And joined by my other early bird, because she's always early with me, is Niléane.

Niléane, how are you? I'm doing well. Today you're getting wet hair, Niléane. I was just in the shower. My hair is, it smells good. I can absolutely smell it from here. Yep, I smell through the microphone. It smells amazing. It smells like coconut. No, no, probably no. Wait. It smells like burnt toast. Why does something smell like burnt toast all of a sudden? It smells like flowery shampoo. Shambost.

Nice. All right. Well, we have a feedback thing. And I think, Niléane, you put this in here. I know it was kind of directed towards you. So I'm going to let you go for it. Yes. We had. So the funny thing, we had two feedback from two people. And those two are named Alex. And as far as I understand, they are two different Alexes. Oh, I thought it was the same. Yeah, because the emails are different. So I assume two different Alexes.

But both Alexes wrote in about the Discord segment we did last week. Let me read the first. So how am I going to distinguish the Alex? Alex 1 and Alex 2. Yeah, Alex 1. The person that wrote in first is Alex 1. The person that wrote in second is Alex 2. There you go. Alex 1 replied to one point that Matt was questioning at some point. How are the phone bans in schools implemented?

How does it work? I replied that in France, as far as I know, in regard to that law that I mentioned, you will not be able to bring your phone to school. But obviously that law has not passed yet for high school, so who knows. But they said, they wrote, while I can't speak to how every school does the no phones rule, I can speak to how they do it and my daughter's middle school. Kids are allowed to bring their phones, but turn them into their first period class every morning, then retrieve them at the end of the day.

What I've heard from most of the kids is that they actually like the balance and time away from phone distractions in class so that's interesting i okay yeah i think that's one decent way of doing it like so that at least the kids can get to their phones in case of an emergency or whatever and also they have their phones when they leave school and can reach their parents or whoever once they're outside the school nice that makes some sense to me yeah it makes sense um alex too wrote in and responded in regard to the what i said about the fact that

online spaces are precious to queer and marginalized people and they wrote in that as a queer person growing up much earlier than she did, speaking about me. So people are old. One of the two Alexes is old. It is one old Alex, Alex one, and old Alex is what we can say, yeah? This is getting confusing, but okay. Because what if Alex one is older than Alex two, which is now Alex old?

And what if they're both younger than me, which would be just hurtful. Okay, so the Alex's can write back in to let us know how old they are in relation to Matt. But they continue. Those spaces were even more important and relevant. Part of my refuge in my teenage year was to confide in those platforms. That was their infancy at the time as a place of escape and to discover my community. The late 90s and early 2000s were a very different place on the internet, and generally the acceptance of queer people was very different.

And I have a lot of those spaces that no longer exist to thank for helping me get through it. So I thought it was nice that I wrote in and spoke about the experience as well in that regard. Yeah, and so you're welcome to leave feedback in the feedback form, whether you called Alex or not. but we welcome all the Alex's we are inclusive of all the Alex's yes except Alex Cox you know what you did

I'm just kidding wow they're just fun to mess with okay that brings us to our single tiny topic which is truly a tiny topic because I was reading the old Helium browser release notes today as you do on a Monday morning and I noticed some fixes that they shipped for their side tabs. And I was like, side tabs? Helium doesn't have side tabs. Oh, was I so wrong. Helium has side tabs. They work how all the other side tabs work.

And I'm just bringing it up because I will keep saying it forever and ever. ARK is the most influential UI design product of the last 10 years. It is unbelievable. They have made the entire web browser market adopt this whole thing that was not a thing before, except for in Vivaldi where it was weird and a weird opera thing. Anyway, unbelievable. Side tabs are everywhere. So when I saw this mentioned in the show notes, I checked it out, updated Helium just an hour ago, and I checked out the side tabs, and you're so right.

The way that all those browsers are hiding the sidebar, they're doing it in a specific way. The way they're designing the sidebar is very much like ARC. The way pin tabs work at the top has tiles. And yeah, this is, yeah, you're quite right. It's crazy. Anyway, shout out to the browser company. Also, shout out to the browser dumpany, which is what Neelian, you said last week when I was discussing something.

And I actually had to make my subtitles project uncorrect that because it was like, you clearly mean the browser company. don't you? No, no, no. You were referencing the browser dumpany. Listen to last week's episode. I'm so confused. I don't remember. You definitely said browser dumpany. Okay. I make high-quality jokes, it seems. And this week on Cozy Zone, we finished roasting our listeners' home screen, and I think it broke into

a yelling match at one point. I think we just started yelling at each other because we all had some interesting takes. So go check that out. For those that aren't aware, Cozy Zone is our member show that we do every week. You get a whole extra episode of us blessing your ears with our vocal tones and mostly yelling. Not really. It is a weird name for that show. I think we probably should have workshopped the name a little bit more because Cozy Zone really makes it seem like everything's calm. But like the last few episodes have been us yelling a lot.

like Matt made me homeless without a girlfriend and career list. Then there was like the whole Star Wars thing. Oh, man. The Star Wars one I'll never forget. The Star Wars one was epic. If you didn't listen to that. It's cozy still. It is cozy. Yeah. Okay. All right. This is what we do in our cozy time. We yell at each other. It's like ASMR if you like yelling. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, I don't even know how to move on from there. Oh, you know what? Speaking of yelling, I have something I need to confess, and I'm probably going to get yelled at for this.

Oh, boy. So I – is this a safe space? It's not. I know it's not. I don't even know why I'm asking that question. It's not. It's really not. I have been using the Mac more and more. I'm still using the iPad. I'm like 50-50 so can I a little brief history so literally a year ago I made a video titled changing my relationship

with the iPad and I was frustrated with iPadOS and I was just like ah it's never gonna change never gonna change and then fast forward a few months and iPadOS 26 came out and I was like oh my god this is amazing it fixes so many issues and it does it does fix so many issues do not let Neil Leon tell you differently it does fix a lot of issues but there's been tools and things that have happened in the last few months that have just been really nice to use. And guess what?

They only work on the Mac. And because of restrictions to iPadOS, they'll probably never work on the iPad. I mean, one I've been yelling about for a long time is just getting a Chrome browser on the iPad. And technically, you could do that in the EU, but nobody has made a Chrome browser. As far as I'm aware, nobody's made a Chrome browser. for the iPad in the EU because it's only one market that it can do it in and I don't know about any developer but I wouldn't want to waste. It is also because there are too many technical limitations.

Not to get into the details. Okay, yeah, we don't have time for that. But it doesn't exist. Technically there is a region that it could exist but it doesn't exist. And where I am you just can't do it. So there are tools that I've been playing around with and stuff that and processes that I've been doing that have just made working from the Mac so much nicer and easier to do. For example, and I'm just going to say sorry, Neelion, right off the bat for bringing it up again, but Claude.

Like, Claude on the Mac is, like, Claude on the iPhone and iPad is good. You could do a lot with it. There's projects, there's the voice stuff, like, there's a lot you can do with it. But Claude on the Mac is just next level. You have the co-work and code features, which Matt and I talked about a few weeks ago. But the ability to just like, hey, point Claude, I'm sorry, Claude at a folder and tell it to take all the documents that are in this folder and create a summary of them or graphs based on the numbers or clean up the folder

or do all sorts of different things based on what's in that folder is so nice. Like, it's been so handy. and then there's mcp and mcp you could technically do the stuff on the ipad but from my experience it's just worked best on the mac so i've hooked uh claude using mcp up to notion and i've built a project that basically allows me to uh i created a prompt that basically allows me to take pdf documents that are receipts business expense receipts drag them into claude and just hit enter

and what it does is it takes a look at all of that, understands what each one of those PDFs are. It then looks at my documents, sees if there's anything like that in there before. It will take those receipts and let's just say, okay, Xfinity is one of those. I pay Xfinity every single month, unfortunately, an ungodly amount of money to have internet access. It takes a look at like, oh, hey, here's your Xfinity thing in your expense tracking.

It will add the new total to my Xfinity thing, and it just keeps going. And then like if I buy a new app, I just drag the receipt into it, and it'll say like, what's an app? We'll just say, I don't know. We'll say drafts. Okay. You paid your yearly subscription for drafts. So here's a drafts line item. Here's how much you paid for it. And it's just, it's made expense tracking so easy. I don't have to sit there and manually type things out, which I wouldn't want to do. So it would just pile up and then I'd have to spend like three hours typing in receipts and saving receipts.

Now what I do is I literally just take the PDF and just drag it and boom, saved, boom, done, added right to the expense tracker. It's so unbelievably nice. Another thing I've been doing with Claude and like MCP is drafts. is an MCP server now. So what's cool about this, so if you go into Cloud and you go into the connections, you scroll down, you connect all these things. So I have been working on it. I haven't got it completely working perfect just yet, but I've been working on another project with drafts

that allows me to take the SRT file, which I get using Matt's quick subtitles app, for my videos. So the SRT file, for those unaware, it's the subtitles file. So it has literally every word that I say in that video. So it has all the mentions of apps, all the mentions of products, all the mentions of whatever I'm going to say will be in the description. And I have it go through, pull all of those apps, get all the links, and just add it right into my drafts document for the description of the video.

It's so nice. And it's still not working quite perfectly. It's not catching everything. I need to keep tweaking it a little bit. But this is always the thing I look forward to doing the least, because when I have links for the show notes or descriptions for my video, I have a lot of links. Like, I end up putting a lot of links in my videos, and it takes so long to do it. And I used to have to manually go and get all these, but now I'm just dragging and dropping this SRT file in there, and it's really nice.

So, yeah, Claude. Nelian disappeared. She's gone. I think she's mad at me. it's okay I understand the things you're talking about I'm not mad can I ask a question yes so explain so I know what MCP is of course but assuming I did not know what it was how would you explain to me like in one sentence what it is it's x callback URL but like advanced advanced xCallbackURL, essentially.

Now, Chris, obviously, I know what xCallbackURL is. But I pretend we're on. Okay, okay, all right, okay, okay. Think about it this way. It is, it's kind of like a path. It is a path connecting two different services using, like, Claude as the connector. So, basically, you're able to type into Claude, hey, create this document in Notion. And Claude is connected to Notion, and MCP is the path, and it can go from Claude in the app of Claude,

and it connects to your Notion account, and you can do all that stuff. And then you can do things like with drafts and stuff like that. And there's tons of different services that support it. Airtable is one of them. All those big business boy virtualer apps, they all support it. Figma now supports MCP. It's kind of like an API that's LLM centric. Yeah. There's a lot you can do with it and it's really cool.

I truly believe Apple's big thing was App Intense that they were talking about and this was going to be a part of the next generation of Siri and this was how you're going to get it to do the oh when is my mom's flight coming in kind of thing and it would search your email and pull all that information for you this is like app intense but actually works yeah it'll be interesting to see what uh what apple does with their app intense i don't think it's actually going to be that big of a deal and they're going to use mcp i because that my my prediction is now that they're partnering with jim and i they're going

to use mcp and not app intense maybe app intense might be like part of the hook but i i think the the main path is going to be MCP. But anyways, uh, going through a couple of other things. Um, Final Cut Pro for the iPad. I edit a lot of my videos on Final Cut Pro for the iPad, but I have a, I have a new issue with it. Um, Oh yeah. You need to export in the background, right? No, that's there now. Remember we've talked about this. I mean, that's there now. That's not a problem anymore.

That's not, that's not a problem. The problem is actually my own making. I bought a fancy new cinema camera, and the bit rate is too high for a base M-series computer that doesn't have a fan. Champagne problems. Yes, exactly. This is absolutely a problem of my own making. My Canon R5, I was able to edit footage. I was able to edit that footage on the iPad, no problem.

With the Canon C50 that I have, I have to go in and turn the playback mode. I have to turn it into performance. And even then it still stutters a little bit. And I hate it because it looks like crap while I'm editing. And I know the final outcome is not affected by this. The final outcome of the product is not affected by this. But I, while I'm editing, am seeing a very low resolution of the product. Like really bad. It is frustrating. It is very frustrating. And it is very annoying.

And because of that, I've been doing like initial edits on the iPad Pro and then exporting the project and then like doing all the B-roll stuff on the Mac. And that's really frustrating. The other thing, too, and it's another champagne problem, because I got a fancy cinema camera, it doesn't have what's called IBIS, which is in-body stabilization. So what that does is it kind of stabilizes your footage as you're recording it combined with lens stabilization. So you don't really have to do a bunch of like post-production stabilization.

Like normally the footage right out of the camera is just fine. But this camera doesn't have IBIS. So I just have lens stabilization. And it's the footage looks really shaky. So Final Cut Pro for the iPad doesn't have post-production stabilization in it. Only Final Cut Pro for the Mac does. So I'm having to put the project on the Mac and click the stabilize button for some of this footage. And that's really frustrating because there's not really a good way to stabilize footage on the iPad again.

And it's just like it's killing me. It's killing me. And there's like a bunch of other like smaller things like Time Machine. Having that on the Mac is a big deal for me because I am still not comfortable with the idea of how iPads do backup. meaning it only backs up to iCloud when your iPad is locked and plugged into power. And my iPad isn't in that position a lot because it usually charges when I'm sitting at my desk that's behind me when it's plugged into my monitor.

And that's when I'm using it. I don't usually like plug my iPad in and just leave it locked and off. I didn't realize that's how it worked. Yeah. I assumed it would just go, if it had enough battery, it would just do it in the background. My iPad is never plugged in. Like it plugs in when it's low on battery going to need to charge it up but like that's sitting overnight that's that's probably when yours does backups and for most people that's going to be fine because you're not adding a bunch of new data to your ipad but i who edits video on my ipad who's using a cinema camera who

the file sizes are very large now have very big files so it's practically never backing up and i get the notification all the time of your ipad has not been backed up in three weeks and that really makes me uncomfortable so i'm like oh that's there and then like the other side is i have a bunch of hazel scripts set up that automatically back up like when i add new when i like create new video footage or i'm sorry when i add new video footage to my mac and stuff like that into certain folders it backs up that footage automatically it backs up thumbnails it backs up final video projects

automatically it does a bunch of stuff where it takes that and creates versions of that on my nas outside of Time Machine, because I don't really like using Time Machine as an archive. I don't want to use Time Machine as an archive. I have my own separate archive for stuff I know I need to pull up. So it makes me uncomfortable that the iPad doesn't have proper ways of automating that. And before anyone tells me, yes, you can make shortcuts, automations, and stuff like that, they don't work. I've tried it. They don't work with large files. They will work like once or twice, and then they just give up.

It doesn't work right. So I have come to the place where I am striking a balance now. And I think it's a healthy balance where my iPad is my singular focus device. Like if I am focusing on a single task, like writing some scripts, knocking out some emails, working on small video projects like short form stuff, which I've made a bunch of short form stuff lately, but I haven't published it because I'm still like figuring out what short form should be.

I don't want to just publish stuff for the sake of publishing. I'm really trying to figure out what it is before I start pushing this. So I've been doing all that on my iPad. But like bigger projects, like big videos and stuff like that, I've been doing it on the Mac. And I kind of like this balance. I kind of like this. I like that. And I've been doing things like locking down my iPad more where I've been taking off more distracting apps. I've been locking down notifications.

and things like that and i think i'm at this point where i'm what i'm probably going to do is i'm probably going to have my ipad be my portable machine where if i'm working at this desk or my living room or out of the house or traveling or whatever that's my main machine for that kind of stuff and i'm going to get either uh when they come out an m5 pro mac mini or an m5 max max studio and i'm going to use that as my main main desk machine and i don't know if you know this but if you spec out like an m4 pro mac mini and an m5 or an m4 max max studio and they're

about the same specs there's only about a 300 difference there and if you're spending like three grand on a computer already three thousand dollars isn't that much like or i'm sorry if you're Spending $3,000 on a computer already, $300 isn't that much. $3,000 would be different. So I think that might be what I do. But yeah, that's kind of been like where I'm at right now. That's kind of been my secret confession is that I've been using the Mac more and more. And I kind of like it because there's just tools there that are on the Mac that just aren't going to come to the iPad.

And I think I've kind of finally come to the realization that the iPad isn't going to get these unless Matt Birchler's recent blog post comes true. Oh, you mean the one where I caused a stink because I said they're going to kill iPadOS? Yeah, you got some. You know, what's funny is I like quote posted your blog post on like all the platforms and nobody came to me. It was like this won't happen. They all went straight to you. And I was like, OK, I'm good with this. They went straight to the source and I respect that.

Yeah, I'm like, you know what? I'm good with that. They directed their anger at the right guy. Yep, they did. And I appreciate that. But yeah, so that's kind of where I'm at. I feel uncomfortable, but I think that's actually a good thing because I need to push myself outside of my comfort zone. And I need to be trying new things. And when I always fall back to just working on the iPad, I get comfortable and I feel like I get put in this like rut almost of like kind of covering the same things.

And when I get uncomfortable, that's when I feel like I'm at my best. So I'm kind of enjoying being uncomfortable at this point. Nice. Well, I dream we live in a world one day where you can just use a Mac and not be worried about the reactions and just be happy. And just do whatever makes you happy, you know? There's a reason why this is a comfort zone topic and not a video. Fair enough. What I'm hearing is you need a computer.

Who doesn't? I mean, an iPad is a computer. Yeah. Right. Cracking a cold one open, by the way. Because after that topic, I need it. It is 8.30 where Chris is right now. 8.30 people. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you for sharing with us, Chris. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for making it a safe space. I think the most baffling one is the backup stuff. Yeah. Yeah, that's really bad.

The fact that I, as an iPad Pro user, I think, and I don't even think this is egotistical to say. I think it's fair to say I am in the top 1%, maybe even 1% of 1% of iPad users as follows the knowledge of how the iPad works goes. And the fact that I can't point my iPad at my NAS and tell it to back up the file system there is ridiculous.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, not to go down too much of a tangent, but you said you have those huge files with Final Cut and the video stuff. Do we even want that part of your backup? Is that part of the device backup? You do, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%, because what if I'm working on a big video project and the Mac dies or something gets deleted or something like that? I absolutely want those. And you know what? Like those big files, when it's on my MacBook Pro, they back up to my NAS so fast.

Like I am backing up hundreds and hundreds of gigs almost every day, and it backs up to my NAS incredibly fast. And I have a limit on my NAS, so my NAS is basically partitioned into two separate, I forget what Synology calls it, but essentially there's two different pools of storage. There's my archive pool, and there's my time machine pool. And my time machine pool is limited to 18 terabytes and then my archive gets the rest. Only 18 terabytes. Oh, man. It can't ever go past 18 terabytes, which gives me like a couple of months of backups, which is just enough for me to like work through projects.

And then like, if I need to go back and because like, like this has happened to me before and I've been better about this in the past of like, I work with a sponsor and sponsors was really happy with a video. Oh, hey, we want to sponsor you next month as well. you can just use that same sponsor segment that you used in the last video. And I'm going to go, oh, crap, I deleted that video project already. Because I don't want to back up the whole project because that would be hundreds and hundreds of gigs for every project. And that's just too much storage. So I've gone back into Time Machine in the past, pulled that project, got the sponsor spot out, and then just was able to put that back in there,

which saves me a ton of time. Okay. I just thought of a Cozy Zone episode we should do about our backup strategies because I'm realizing they will be very different. Ooh, that's a good episode. One of us is a chaos monster. It's Matt Birchler. He always is a chaos monster. I just don't know how to use computers, guys. I don't know. I'm just fumbling my way through. Yeah. All right, Matt, what do you got for us this week? Okay, well, I too have a confession to make.

It is a secret that I've been keeping for a little over a week. You're back on the iPad, too. Yeah, let's go, baby! I'm rethinking my relationship with the Mac, and I'm wearing a traditional watch. So I haven't worn my Apple Watch in a week, which, for me, is a big deal. I was a huge Pebble fan way back when they looked like cereal box toys and with E-ink screens that did basically nothing, but there was an Evernote app for some reason.

I was day one Apple Watch, like this is going to be the next big thing. And to my credit, there's nothing more mainstream in the watch world than an Apple Watch. You were the big Apple Watch boy in our sphere for a while too. I tried to be. You were the one writing the watchOS reviews and stuff. I was. It was a teachy-esque in that that was like the big thing I read every year. It wasn't nearly as big as it is, I'm sure. But yeah, so I was the watch guy for a while. And then it turned out there was not much to talk about with the watch stuff.

So I was like, maybe I don't make my whole online personality by one device. And so that's a really good thought right there. That's a really good idea. Then you realized you used another computer in your life. Yes. And then people yell at you if you use that other computer. Yeah. Anyway, so here's what happened is a couple weeks ago, there was just a perfect storm of notifications coming into my phone.

And because I had my watch on, they're coming into the watch. And it was like two iMessage threads and like, I forget what else. It was just like someone, it was like a boxer at one of those bag things, just rattling my wrist. and I was just like I was I wanted to scream it was so annoying it was like it's attached to me so I couldn't get rid of it and like they were coming in so fast I would like look at it and I try to like silence it but then like the next one had come in so I didn't have time because the animation was playing in between and I was like I hate this thing I want it off my wrist I'm gonna stop

and so I got a cheap little watch and I've been wearing it and what it has done for the past week has given me an appreciation for the Apple Watch, as well as shown a few things that I like about not having it. So I just wanted to go through the things. And I'll start with the things I actually appreciate more about the Apple Watch now, having not had it for a week. So the first thing, I check the weather all the time, apparently. I live in the Midwest, the weather's changing, It's February.

Last week, I went to the grocery store in a t-shirt. It was 60 degrees. Today, it is 15 degrees. The weather changes. So I need to know. I don't understand that concept as somebody that lives in California. It's not 70 degrees all the time and you're not just hitting the beach in the afternoon. No, I want to die when I go outside today. It's not great. Wow. It's the time of the year where I'm like, why do I choose to live here? And then the summer comes and I'm like, oh, it's great. So yeah, so I check the watch when I'm going out for a run, when I'm going out to walk the dog. This is like three times per day that I'm going out and I'm checking the weather.

If I'm going out to the store, right, checking the weather. And apparently I literally do it every time by looking at my wrist. And now I have to reach into my pocket to grab my phone. It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying. Similarly, I like tracking my workouts. I don't need all the data, but just distance and time is great to have. I can see how I'm doing. I can see if I'm getting faster, slower, whatever. Starting a workout on the phone is possible now. This was not possible before iOS 26, so I'm happy this is possible in the first place.

But on my watch, I just had the action button set to open the fitness app, start a workout app, start a workout, boom, I'm going. Now, I have to take my phone out of my pocket, open the app. I've actually set my action button to open it and started. It's annoying. You can ask Siri to start a workout. However, maybe it's just a beta issue on 26.4, but it starts the workout, but the timer doesn't move. So it just sits at zero. And that's not great. So you can't do it with Siri.

I have to open the actual thing. I have a smart lock on my front door. So I'm used to locking and unlocking the front door with it. Again, you know where this is going. I have to pull out the phone now and do it there. My watch in bed. I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes. It's dark out. Is it dark because it's 5 a.m. and my alarm's going to go off in 30 minutes? Or is it dark because it's 2 a.m. and I really need to go back to sleep? With the Apple Watch, it's just, it's there. It's lit up.

It's always easy to read. With this one, at least, it technically glows in the dark, but not nearly enough. Yeah. So, yeah, that's annoying. Also, the thing I maybe missed the most is the silent alarm. buzzing my wrist. Oh, yeah. I did not appreciate how much I love this because I've been waking up to the godforsaken sound of my iPhone on my bedside dresser for the past week, and it is horrible.

I hate it so much. I have a little side story here for you about this that will trigger some people. The default alarm that's on iOS is what I and a bunch of other people I used to work with used. Well, one of our salespeople had this brilliant idea of changing his ringtone to the default alarm sound. So every time his phone would ring, we would all have this PTSD moment of, oh, my God, our alarms are going off.

And we forced him to change his ringtone because of that. We were all being triggered thinking, oh my God, it's time to wake up, time to go to work. Also, that was not on purpose to trigger you. I don't know if it was... He was not a very smart guy. So I honestly think he probably just picked it because he liked it and it was loud and it got his attention because he was a sales guy. So he's always answering his phone. If it's on purpose, it's a genius prank. It's a very high level troll. I have no problem saying this because I did not like this guy at all.

him and I got into it a few times. I did not like this guy at all. He was not a very smart person. I don't even care. Be mad at me if you want me to say that. He's in a feedback form, by the way. Let me read. If he is. Yeah. No. Trust me. Okay. Anyways. That was a tight story. Yeah. Also, don't set your... I grew up in the era where you could buy ringtones, and so we would set our flip phones. we would use like songs we liked and you would like wake up to that song every day and you thought i'd be so happy but no you would hate that song and so now i still like there's certain songs that

come on and i'm like oh no yeah face down by the red jumpsuit apparatus yes yes um okay notifications were one of the problems as well uh i was annoyed that they were just attached to my body um very annoying now i'm still getting those notifications and because of the challenge I was hearing those notifications as well as feeling them. Thank you for that. This was very inconvenient for me this week.

Those notifications are in my pocket. So I don't know if it was a text message. I don't know if it was an email. I don't know if it was important or not. And again, previously, I would look at the wrist and I'd be annoyed, but I would know what it was. And I knew I had to do something with it right away. Whereas now, they all feel the same. So who knows? So I have to check the phone to know if there are actual issues. I missed the passive health tracking. So there's a whole bunch of health stuff that's going on in the background. And you can, every once in a while, I'll open the health app and I'll see my month over month trend or several years of trends of what's my cardiovascular health, what's my VO2 max.

These are interesting things to see. And I will not have those if I stick without this. It's a little limiting to have no style choices with the watch face. I want to, like, press down and hold on this watch and, like, swipe between different watch faces if I feel like a digital one today or something else. But no. Well, it's actually not limiting. It's just you've got to use your wallet, and then you can get as many watch faces as you want. That's true. That is true. The traditional watch face actually has a watch face market.

Watch face, watch, you know what I'm trying to say. A watch face market, yes. Thank you. And the final thing is timers and stopwatches. I use these a decent amount. And while this specific watch does have a tachometer, it has the thing where it does a stopwatch. Oh, yeah, yeah. But I hate it. I hate it so much. An analog stopwatch is very annoying. I'm, like, doing the math. I don't like it. And it's also not very useful if you're setting an 18-minute timer for cooking something. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Mine doesn't do timers either, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess I could pay more. probably get one that does that but so i miss all these things i really do but there is not all bad there are some things that are good these are cheaper now you can spend a lot more i did for fun look at what a rolex costs um and from what i can tell they're like basic is a 16 000 watch and if you add like platinum and diamonds and stuff to it i got up to 250 000 which is uh outside the price range that's a house well it is well yeah it depends on where you live yeah it could it could definitely be a house depends when you live

true um but but there's plenty of other watch companies and you can buy a very nice watch for like 200 400 dollars which is apple watch price so you know within within some sort of reason um There's no charging. I just take it off and I put it on the table or whatever and I don't worry about charging it. I don't know when this will die. Many months from now, years from now, I have no idea. But not in two days like my Apple Watch Ultra would.

I like that I don't have to unlock it. I just put it on and there's no pin to enter. It doesn't care who I am. It's just a watch. So that's nice. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So I think I'm going to go back to the Apple Watch. is my bro just reviewed a regular watch and realized smartwatches might be better and I think maybe I just need to reduce my notifications very aggressively okay so Matt I I wrote down I took down some notes oh no I wrote down

every item that you mentioned about liking an Apple watch and I'm here to tell you you don't need an Apple watch and I will go through every item so first you mentioned the weather yes uh just poke ahead outside bro next item that's so impossible i don't that's my fix you take it you leave it that's my fix for you um second item you you need to work out yeah live your life don't stop torturing yourself with that

he's in his 40s now he needs to work out we want him to last you know at least another 10 like come on we know we need him to work out just be happy stop slavery is over it makes me happy third item um you needed to unlock your smart lock yes yeah just so just get a key no I left my life behind no just use a key it's fine keys are fine I don't I don't I will never understand the smart lock thing just use a key nobody was ever bothered by the key.

I don't know why the Silicon Valley wants to abolish keys. I disagree. The whole world is dealing just fine with keys. Stop it. Neil Young's wrong. I don't have a single key on my key ring. All I have is my Mustang car fob and an air tag. Okay. For a time, you said you need to check the time at night. Yes. When you wake up. So use the clock. There are clocks. Yeah, get an LED alarm clock. We have one in our bedroom.

Yes. Yeah. You can get them and they're quite dim. You can get a clock. Yeah, this is the one I agree with Neil. I don't like this at all. Just have a clock. It's the most compelling so far, but I don't love it. Fifth item, you said the silent alarm is great. I think you should try one of those alarm clocks that fill the room with light instead of doing sound. Those are amazing. You know what you get? You know what you get? You get the alarm clock deaf people use that shake the bed.

Oh, wow. So that way, I mean, it's the same thing. Instead of a vibration on the wrist, it shakes the bed. Okay. So this is the episode where I get a divorce. Yes. I'm homeless. As my wife, who sleeps in several hours later than me, when it's not a work day, is like in the shaking bed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, Neil and I told me. I guess that's an issue with the floodlight as well. Okay, six items. You mentioned you like having the notifications, right?

Apparently, I do sometimes, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no. Disable them all. And this would have fixed your challenge, by the way. Seventh item, you mentioned health tracking. Once again, just live your life. Who cares? Nobody cares about health. I care about it. I would like Matt to at least less than another 10 years. And eight items. You mentioned timers. Come on. You know how to count. Just count. Just count on my head? Yes. All right.

It's a 60-minute timer. Here we go. Stop thinking you need devices to count. Next Thanksgiving, when you're cooking that turkey, Matt, and you need to set it for like four hours, go ahead and just count that in your head. You don't know how long four hours is? Come on. So to sum up, get a key, look outside when you need to know the weather, get a clock, and learn how to count is my... I think none of these are reasonable. I refuse to learn to count. As an American, I don't want to know how to count.

I barely know how to read. Okay. Yeah, you will... Yeah. Knowing you, you will have found a way to count time using ounces or whatever. So yeah. you may be right yeah Matt Niuian I have a confession what? I haven't been wearing my Apple Watch either oh I mean that you know you realize that's a normal thing like people don't wear Apple Watches that's normal I I I I have been like Matt my Apple Watch was going nuts

with notifications and I just ripped the thing off and I haven't put it back on And I'm just, I'm happy, except for our challenge this week, but we'll get to that. That almost caused a divorce in my house, and I'm not even married yet. Oh, boy. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, thank you for hearing me out. And I'm going to put that Apple Watch back on pretty soon, I think. But I'm going to go as long as I can without. Okay. I think, similar to you, I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn off all notifications and see how that life works.

Yeah. I wish, here's what I wish. I wish there was a way for me to set a circuit breaker. If I start to get X number of notifications over a certain time period, just stop delivering them. Just assume that I don't need them. Give me a snooze them for a little bit. That's something I think they need to do with group chats. If group chats are really active, They need to stop delivering notifications for each individual message, and then they just need to be like, like you said, every few minutes, give me a summary of what's going on.

That's always the big thing for me. That's always my issue. Apple already does summaries, Chris. They do summaries. But they still deliver every notification and then update the summary every single time. It would be nice. Yeah, just like once this chills out, then send me the summary notification. Yeah. Yeah, that would be actually nice. That would be really, really nice. All right. Should we get into the challenge? Yeah. Yes. Okay. It was Neil-Leon's challenge. What did you curse us with?

So this will be short and sweet, I'm sure, to review. The challenge was live with sound on your iPhone for a full week. Considering that I assumed, and I rightly so assumed, that we all live with our iPhones in mute permanently, as sane people do. And yeah, so I challenged us to just turn it off, just go back to sound zone, which is how most people seem to use iPhones, by the way.

I think we are in the minority. I'd love to see numbers on this. I don't think we are. You definitely notice the people who don't, of course. Yeah. Especially the people that still have sounds on for when they're typing on the keyboard. Yeah, that's... Oh, those are monsters. That's a crazy one. You are a monster if you do that. Who would use something that makes software noises whenever you click a key? Monsters. Monsters do that. Absolutely understandable, I think.

Anyway. So I think we should do this as a conversation. How did it go? I hated this. Day one, Danielle commented on, like, why is your phone making noises? Because her phone doesn't make noises. My phone doesn't make noises. Like, I'm like, she was like, why? And I had to explain. I'm like, Nealian forced me to do this. And she was like, ah. And then it just kept making noises.

It wouldn't stop. I literally have used Do Not Disturb a lot. I use focus modes a lot. I had to use focus modes so much this week or I wouldn't have got anything done. And then so many apps make noises when you open them. Why do apps make noises? Yeah, that's crazy, right? I don't need video auto-playing sounds all the time. Yeah, I mean, I had my phone in the other room, And it just kept going, bloop, bloop, bloop.

And I had to get out of my comfortable couch. And I had to go all the way over there and shut the stupid thing up. But I couldn't shut it up because of the rules. And so I just kind of had to have my phone next to me. And then if it's like notifications from like iMessage, even if you have the iMessage app open, when they come in, they still go. Yes. Oh, so that's one of the things I liked. So there are some sounds in some apps that I think are satisfying. Oh, yeah. And the sounds in iMessage, when you're sending messages, and when the new one comes in, I like those.

They're very nice sounds. They're very well done. I just wanted to scream. I couldn't take it. You know, another one that I think is satisfying is the haptic touch sound on iOS. So that's a system sound, right? The sound of haptic touch? Yeah. Does that not do it for you? Let me turn off mute again. up if I do this. Wait, you have mute on? Neelion didn't follow the rules. Wait, wait, the challenge was over.

No, the challenge's not over until we talk about it. You did not even notice HaptiTouch had a sound. Did you have it on? It's not a sound. It doesn't make a sound. Look, it's just a feeling. It does sound. Yes, I'm not crazy. Okay, there is a sound. Yes. It's very... Okay, that's very, very minimal. Okay, I didn't even realize it was a sound. It does a slight click. I think it's really nice. Yeah. One thing, one anecdote.

I had a very important thing at a very important place this week. No. At our organization, we held an event at the National Assembly. And obviously, it would be not great to have your phone doing sound. But I thought ahead. Like, I was anxious about this from the moment I woke up that day.

I was like, okay, don't forget. Go into the do not disturb. Don't forget. Don't forget. Don't forget. And then I did not forget. So you see when you are of sound mind, everything goes well. yeah this was this was this was a tough one i i wouldn't say i enjoyed it uh but it wasn't awful it was really just that one moment where i was just like trying to decompress for the day and then off in the corner it sounded like because my mac has sounds that play when like certain things happen i don't know it doesn't really bother me there i don't know why but i guess it's because

it's not like perpetually on it's not it sounded like my mac had like unlocked itself and like was just on in the other room and so it was a whole thing it was all the the thing i realized because i've had sounds off for so long and when i allow notifications and like edit notifications i don't bother turning like going into notifications and turning sounds off uh because you know i just have sounds off on my iphone so it doesn't make any noise so i don't care if the if the toggle's on it doesn't do anything um so many apps make noises i'm just like i don't need you to make a noise like

don't pull my attention away and like i have i struggle with like attention and focus i'm like don't pull my attention away for this stupid thing like i don't need that and you don't realize how even for just notifications apps have different notification sounds like yeah that's that's something you forget about like and and you realize that yeah that's obvious because back in the day the the Twitter app used to do the bird sound for every notification.

Yep. Yeah. I mean, that is nice. If the X still does the bird sound, that would be funny. Oh, my God. I don't even want to think about one of this. It's probably like Elon Musk saying something. I don't even want to get into it. Self-driving to six months away. We're going to my next year. Everyone's going to have an Optimus robot in their house in two years. And these are the nice things he could say. Yeah, that's true. All right. All right. I'm glad we did it.

Because now we know what life is like for those people. Miserable. Turn sounds off. All right. You guys ready for a new challenge? Yes. Yes. It is time for me to exact my revenge. This Thursday is a big day. Now, this challenge is going to be interesting because we're not actually going to be able to do it until the day before we record next. Okay. So this Thursday is a big, big day. And both of my co-hosts have very strong opinions on a subject.

And they both have very wrong opinions on it. So the challenge is we all have Nintendo Switches to play Pokemon FireRed or LeafGreen, which comes out on the Nintendo Switch on Thursday. And you must pick Charmander as your starter. No. yep yep yep yep have to play Pokemon Fire, Red or Leaf, Green I'll leave the version up to you but you have to pick Charmander as your starter you know I've never played Pokemon yep yep this is it so my co-host's opinion so no no no no my co-host's opinion on Pokemon are both very wrong

Neelion's never played a Pokemon game because she's part of the Minecraft generation and Matt thinks for some reason Blastoise is the best starter you need to write in the name of the game I will forget yeah I will put it in the document if you click the spoiler tag I put some funny gifts in there for you it's just gifts of people laughing maniacally yep this is my time to exact revenge you have to have Charmander as your starter you can pick either version I don't care that doesn't really matter what's Charmander Charmander it's the red fire starter

how do you write that you need to tell me everything Play Pokemon. I'll write it in the document after we finish recording. And what is its name in French even? I don't know. Have you thought about that? It's going to be the red one. The red one. Yeah, it's the red dragon one. But he's not technically a dragon type unless you involve him into Charizard X using Megastones, but that's not in this game, so you don't need to worry about that. Charamander. And for bonus, at least try and get through the first gem.

I know we're only going to have one day, So at least try and get through the first gym. But yeah. So mostly I just want to talk about old school Pokemon. And this is my way of doing it. So it's Salamesh. I know Salamesh. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Yes. I love this challenge so much. I'm so excited for this. All right. So that brings us to the point of the game. You build houses, right? With blocks? No, it's Pokemon. You got to catch them all. Got to catch them all. Got to catch all the houses.

Catch all the Pokemon. Okay. And just try and get through the first gym. Understandable if you don't, but just try and get through the first gym. It's not very long to get to the first gym. So you need to dig to which level to get to the gym. You're going to have a lot of fun with this. You're going to have a lot of fun. All right. So that brings us to the end of the show. And we have an end of the show question. And this one was written in by one of our listeners. We have a few lined up. So we'll go through them in the next couple of weeks.

But if you would like to ask us questions or play along, we have a feedback form. Send in tiny topics, questions, whatever. Feel free to send that in. But this one is from Flo. And the question is, would you rather eat pasta or pizza for the rest of your life? And this might be the easiest question we've ever been asked. Pizza. 100% pizza. Pasta. No. What? Obviously pasta. There are so many things you can do with pasta, and it's good.

Whereas if you do the wrong thing with pizza, then it's horrible. There's no bad pizza. Daniel was gone this weekend. Her and her mom went on a trip this weekend. So I made homemade pizza for myself, and I took some pizza dough. I took some barbecue sauce. I put some crushed red pepper, some mozzarella cheese, some pepperoni, some pineapple, some sausage. Put some more mozzarella cheese on top of it. Oh, so good. This guy, when he gets to talk about making pizza, you are never more animated. It's the official pizza of Max Stories.

I just got kicked off the network. Pizza is an American invention. It involves pineapple. Yes. Yep. That's true. That's true. True story. Title. All right. Well, thank you all so much for listening. Thank you to Max Stories for having us, even though this will be the last time ever because I mentioned pineapple on pizza. Sorry, Federico. Actually, no. You know what? I'm not sorry. Not sorry. It's wonderful. It's amazing. Thank you all for listening. Have a great day. Bye-bye.